Media Release
From: Springer NatureDisease-causing genetic mutation corrected in human embryos
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A mutation implicated in a heritable heart condition has been corrected in preimplantation human embryos using the CRISPR–Cas9 genome editing technique, a Nature paper reports. The findings add to our understanding of the safety and efficacy of editing the DNA of the human germline (eggs, sperm or early embryos). However, many issues remain to be considered before clinical applications can be explored, including the reproducibility of these findings with other mutations.
More than 10,000 heritable disorders controlled by a single gene have been identified, including hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a disease of the heart muscle that affects about 1 person in 500, and that can cause sudden cardiac death and heart failure. Inheriting a single copy of a mutation in the MYBPC3 gene can result in HCM. Current treatments for HCM relieve the symptoms without addressing the genetic cause.
One approach to prevent harmful mutations being transmitted to offspring is preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), followed by the selection of embryos without the harmful mutation for transfer and use in an in vitro fertilization cycle. Recent developments in precise genome-editing techniques, such as CRISPR–Cas9, suggest that these techniques could potentially be used to correct disease-causing mutations in human embryos, thus increasing the number of embryos available for transfer.
To evaluate the safety and efficacy of gene correction for heritable diseases in the human germline, Shoukhrat Mitalipov and colleagues focused on the MYBPC3 mutation implicated in HCM. They produced zygotes by fertilizing oocytes from healthy donors with sperm from a heterozygous male carrier of the MYBPC3 mutation, who carries one mutated copy and one normal copy of the gene. They used CRISPR–Cas9 to make a cut on the mutant gene sequence and monitored how human embryos repair these DNA breaks. In most cases, the breaks were repaired efficiently using the non-mutated copy of this gene from the unaffected donor as a mirror. As a result, about two-thirds of targeted embryos contained two mutation-free copies of theMYBPC3 gene. The authors also found a way to eliminate the mosaicism — in which embryos are composed of two or more genetically different types of cells.
The results indicate that the approach is effective and the CRISPR–Cas9 targeting very accurate, providing some assurance regarding safety concerns; moreover, there was no evidence of off-target mutations. These findings suggest that this approach might potentially have applications for the correction of heritable mutations in human embryos in conjunction with PGD.
Please note that information about ethical oversight, consent, participants and data availability is detailed in the methods section of the PDF.
Expert Reaction
These comments have been collated by the Science Media Centre to provide a variety of expert perspectives on this issue. Feel free to use these quotes in your stories. Views expressed are the personal opinions of the experts named. They do not represent the views of the SMC or any other organisation unless specifically stated.
Dr Nathan Palpant is Group Leader, Genomics of Development and Disease Division and Co-Director, Queensland Facility for Advanced Genome Editing in the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at The University of Queensland